“The truest test of civilization, culture and dignity is character, not clothing.”
– Gandhi.

Foreign domestic workers (FDWs) are one of the groups of migrant workers that face a web of difficulties in securing fair terms of employment and safe working conditions. In Singapore, FDWs are excluded from the Employment Act and often face difficulties securing legal recourse for unpaid wages, psychological abuse, food and sleep deprivation, and breaches of contract. While FDWs are legally protected against physical and sexual abuse, they have little or no control over their working conditions, and can only hope for good agents and employers. These exploitative working conditions that FDWs in Singapore face are due to a legal-power imbalance between employers, FDWs, and agencies that has its roots in the prevailing culture and traditional structures of gender in Singapore.

It’s true – Foreign Domestics are an exploited group of workers

When talking about employment, exploitation refers to unethical treatment or unethical terms of employment. The employer-employee relationship becomes unethical when either party is held captive to the relationship and/or is unable to seek recourse for unfair treatment, regardless of whether ill treatment occurs or is prevalent. An extreme example of an unethical and exploitative relationship is the master-slave relation. The master has the power of life and death over their slave. The relationship itself is unethical even if most (or all) masters treat their slaves fairly. In capitalist economies, the group that has the power to dole out wages in return for labour services – employers, often has more power than their employees. Today in Singapore, the empowerment of employees in order for them to negotiate on par with employers has come in the form of the NTUC as well as various trade unions. These groups collectively engage their employers to negotiate for appropriate wages and working conditions. The government also works with these labour unions to come up with an appropriate legislative environment to enforce ethical/legal relationships between employers and employees. Two very important laws in labour-management relations are the Trades Union Act and the Employment Act.

FDWs are excluded from the Trades Union Act and have no right to form unions. However, FDWs are protected from physical and sexual abuse committed by their employers. Section 73 of the Singapore Penal Code provides for “certain offences in the Penal Code to carry 1.5 times the normal maximum penalties, if perpetrated upon a domestic maid by the employer or a member of the employer’s household².” The offences covered by Section 73 include hurt and grievous hurt, wrongful confinement, assault, and the outrage of modesty. The law therefore acknowledges that the circumstance of FDWs living at their employer’s places them in a uniquely vulnerable position not found in other types of work. Section 73 shows that the law acknowledges that FDWs, whose food and shelter are usually provided for by employers, are more dependent on employers than other types of workers, and therefore allows for increased maximum penalties should employers abuse this dependent relationship. Section 73 does not aim to alter the unequal nature of the FDW-employer relationship; it only prevents employers from abusing the status quo relationship through criminal acts against their FDWs.

However, physical and sexual abuses are just the most extreme examples of the abuses faced by FDWs in Singapore. Judging from the complaints received by the Philippine, Indonesian and Sri Lankan embassies (Fu and Singam), FDWs also face unethical terms of employment such as breach of contract, unethical treatment and poor working conditions. Examples of this include withholding wages, psychological abuse, sleep and food deprivation, denial of days off, corporal punishment and unsafe working conditions.

There exist a few channels of recourse available to FDWs who are faced with unethical terms of employment. Many FDWs are fortunate or knowledgeable enough to register themselves as domestic workers with their home embassies in Singapore. Registered workers have access to standard contracts that contain clauses safeguarding FDW safety. The Indonesian Embassy, for example, has a clause that states that the employer must prevent their FDW from cleaning window exteriors if safety cannot be ensured. The drawback of registration is cost – depending on the embassy, these contracts may cost between $70 and $260, a significant percentage of a FDWs monthly wage (Tan et al. 2003). Moreover, many FDWs are unaware that registration exists. As a result, a very large proportion of FDWs are unregistered workers, many of whom may have entered Singapore as tourists³ . Registered or unregistered, FDWs may turn to their embassies for assistance, and the MOM if they feel unfairly treated. The MOM also operates a multilingual hotline for FDWs in distress, and FDW-employer arbitration. Unfortunately, access to these channels is poor for lack of information available to FDWs, especially in the case of less-educated or non-English speaking FDWs, of which Indonesian FDWs are over-represented.

Lost In The Legal Limbo

Most blue-collar jobs are covered by the Employment Act. However, local and foreign domestic workers are specifically excluded from this labour law. Hence, when employers or agents subject their FDWs to unethical, but not illegal forms of ill treatment such as food and/or sleep deprivation or hefty wage deductions for arbitrary placement fees, FDWs have no legal recourse whatsoever. If labour conciliation or negotiation does not work, therse is no mechanism that would allow FDWs to find another employer, unless they were lucky enough to have a benevolent agent. On the other hand, employers have the absolute power to cancel the work permit, upon which the FDW must exit Singapore⁴. Employers have also been known to send their FDWs home, to avoid legal wrangles. The net result of the exclusion of FDWs from the Employment Act and the limited accessibility of channels of recourse is that the process of employment of FDWs in Singapore is an unregulated process that leaves FDWs at the mercy of employers and agents⁵ . This is a clearly exploitative employment situation for all FDWs in Singapore.

Employers, on the other hand, may replace their FDW with relative ease. If the agent has promised replacements, they can exchange the FDW for another one. Otherwise, the employer must, under MOM regulations, pay for the FDW’s airfare home⁶. A single trip airfare may cost up to $370 (one-way Singapore to Sri Lanka), a small sum to the employer when compared to the $5000 security deposit that all employers must foot. This is one example of the clear asymmetry in the FDW-employer relation.

The maid levy of $350 per month per maid effectively makes FDWs the highest income taxpayers by proportion of wages (Liew, 2003). About $41 million is added to tax revenue per annum (Fu and Singam, 2003). However, there exist few regulations, laws or institutions that protect their welfare as employees. In fact, the regulations currently in place have the purpose of limiting their numbers in Singapore (the MOM aims to reduce dependency on FDWs), or have the unintended effect of denying the very human needs of FDWs. For example, compulsory 6-monthly medical examinations aim to spot whether FDWs are pregnant, instead of monitoring the general and sexual health and well being of FDWs, some of whom may still be going through puberty. The $5000 deposit, a financial disincentive for employing FDWs that employers must foot, is not used to benefit FDWs through, for instance, skills training or occupational health insurance (employers are required by the MOM to provide only basic insurance). Instead, this deposit encourages employers to confine FDWs at home and deny them days off as they fear the loss of the deposit should their FDWs become pregnant. $5000 is all it takes to stoke employer’s paranoia over FDW ‘misbehavior’. In fact, regardless of the $5000 deposit, FDWs face deportation if they are found to be pregnant, and will lose their livelihood and source of financial support for their families back home. There is no incentive for FDWs to ‘misbehave’.

“Moral results can only be produced by moral restraints.” - Gandhi

In order to understand how the present exploitative employment situation facing FDWs in Singapore evolved, let us first examine how the MOM justifies its current policy stance of excluding FDWs from the purview of the Employment Act. Two main reasons have been given (Liew, 2003):

1. Labour laws extended into private households would be too intrusive.
2. The different conditions and demands of individual households would mean that laws would be unable to provide a common labour standard. (This is a caution against legislating unenforceable laws.)

With numerous laws that do already intrude into private households such as censorship and anti-dengue regulations, the first reason is a weak justification. In the case of FDWs, in order to ensure fair terms of employment and occupational safety, the law must invariably intrude into the sphere of the household, which, once an FDW enters, is simultaneously a workplace. The second reason also does not hold up to scrutiny: housework comprises easily definable tasks such as cleaning floors, washing windows, vacuuming carpets, grocery shopping, childcare, elderly care, cooking etc. If one looked up professional housekeeping services, one would find that these activities are easily defined and specified on a bill of services. A more compelling reason for excluding domestic work from the Employment Act is the historical legacy of housework not being perceived as “work” at all.

The Modern Slavery of Housework

Housework has been culturally defined not as work, but as women’s “labour of love” (Romero, 1992, emphasis mine). It is labour that overwhelmingly falls onto the shoulders of women, and women who reject this role (somehow) rattle the very foundations of society. While this may seem anachronistic to many, Singaporean commentators have stated as late as this decade that making the home is the sole responsibility of women as illustrated in the following quote: “It is natural and undeniable that the father ought to be the breadwinner while the mother looks after the young at home. Naturally, when this institution is disrupted, the society pays the price,” (Straits Times, 26 Jan 2000). This rigid definition of gender roles is inherently skewed as it ignores the role of men in homemaking and childcare (Fu and Singam, 2003), a role that has increasing importance if double-income households become more of prevalent. “A woman who neglects her children is a bad mother but a man guilty of the same thing is seen as unlucky in having a bad wife who fails to absolve him from these duties,” (Fu and Singam, 2003). Indeed, the traditional gender roles of father-breadwinner and mother-housewife are still very powerful stereotypes for men and women today.

The ‘traditional housewife’ is a ‘wageless housewife’. She does not earn a money wage for her labour. In fact, her role as homemaker is less a job than an expectation. This has led to a common perception that the housekeeping duties that FDWs perform are not real ‘work’ deserving of decent wages. Indeed, the cultural identification of housework as women’s unpaid work (or rather, non-work as shown by the phrase “labour of love”), has led to its exclusion from the realm of legitimate ‘work’. In the light of these powerful cultural elements, it is not surprising that the Employment Act does not cover FDWs.

Between Here and a Hard Place: The Twin Pressures of Work and Home

Besides the lack of legal protection for FDWs, other factors contribute to the exploitative circumstances of FDW employment. A full description must include the employer’s side of the story as well. Fu and Singam (2003) examine the cultural factors through cases of criminal abuse:

In cases of physical abuse, most perpetrators are female employers who have come to accept the prescribed roles of mother and homemaker. In case descriptions, the abusive employer is very afraid of leaving children, especially young children, in the care of the FDW for fear of mishap, as this would supposedly reflect the abuser’s failure to balance the demands of work and home (if the abuser is a working professional), or failure to perform as a homemaker. Thus, even when in the supervisory role, these women become enraged when they feel that their FDW has failed to perform to their expectations (Fu and Singham, 2003). While the FDW is hired in order to relieve the mother from housekeeping or childrearing duties, the FDW instead becomes a punching bag for the abuse to vent her frustrations over the overwhelming demands she faces.

Certainly, most employers do not physically abuse their FDWs. However, many women face the same pressures that have overwhelmed abusers. This may contribute to the disturbing frequency of the unethical, but not illegal, treatment of FDWs. Informants relate that a few employers have overworked FDWs, or have even used food and sleep deprivation as ways to reprimand poor performance (Fu and Singam, 2003). On the other hand, employers who hire FDWs rightly expect a certain quality of service. Given the non-standardized state of training for FDWs, employers, too, lose out from the unregulated state of the industry. Poor performance, however, is not a justification for unethical treatment of FDWs.

Miss Dissed: Discrimination and the Foreign Domestic

A further frustration for many employers in general is the perception that the FDW is less capable or less intelligent, though the FDW may herself be a mother and homemaker. (Ironically, some agents advise employers to employ younger FDWs who would have less experience in childcare, as they are more pliant.) This perception that FDWs are less intelligent, “blur” or “stupid” is a consequence of the level of elitism in Singapore. The ideology of meritocracy attributes success to hard work and talent, and all but ignores the differences in availability of resources to those of different backgrounds and classes (Fu and Singam, 2003). Though there are a few shining counterexamples in the media, the fact is a child from a family in the lower-income bracket is less likely to succeed on the same terms as someone from a higher-income family. That these same standards are applied to FDWs who are from different, even rural, backgrounds therefore places them towards the bottom of Singapore’s social hierarchy. Romero (1992) also reports that “The literature on domestic service universally reports that women find the stigma attached to the role [of domestic worker] painful,” because it is a lowly job. It is no surprise, therefore, that abusers do not respect their FDWs as human beings deserving of the same respect, but instead subject them to beatings, humiliation and assault.

Examples are rife in the media of FDWs clearly being relegated to the lower rungs of Singapore’s hierarchy:

“I was a guest at the British Club and as I was leaving I casually asked the receptionist if maids were allowed into the club. He proudly proclaimed: “No, we are very concerned about the image of the club.”” (Straits Times, 27 Oct 2001).

“Once my family and our maid went to the Singapore Cricket Club to have dinner. We were seated at the patio having pur drinks when a waiter came up and asked: “Is that your maid?…We’ll pack her food so that she can eat it on the stairs near the entrance.”” (Straits Times, 2 Aug 2000).

Discrimination also stains those merely perceived as being FDWs. A Straits Times Forum (2 Aug 2000) letter writer recounted how a waiter at the Singapore Cricket Club approached them to ask if her Sri Lankan family friend was a FDW. According to the writer, the waiter implied through his actions that FDWs were prohibited from dining at the same tables as their employers (Fu and Singam, 2003). These examples beg the question: does Singapore law not cover FDWs equally because society does not perceive FDWs as equally worthy members of society?

FDWs play an important role in our society as child caregivers, elderly caregivers, and housekeepers, especially in the absence of other affordable alternatives. In order for employers to receive quality domestic service and in order for FDWs to be recognized and protected as wage-earning employees, the industry must be set in an appropriate legislative framework and regulated. A first step is to include FDWs under the Employment Act and form adequate institutions to uphold their safety and well-being. A longer-term solution must address the cultural norms regarding womanhood that place undue demands on Singapore women, and render housework as non-work. Furthermore, we must begin to question the entrenched system of meritocracy that produces elitism.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Gandhi.

References:
1) Kelly Fu and Constance Singam, Understanding Maid Abuse in Singapore: Cultural Aspects of Exploitation and Abuse, 2003
2) Tan Hui Yee, Puvaneswari Sundaram and Liew Kah Khiun, Unregulated Business: How foreign domestic workers are recruited, trained, and deployed in Singapore homes, 2003
3) Liew Kah Khiun, Government Policy and the FDW, 2003
4) Mary Romero, Maid in the USA, Routledge, 1992

(Ref 1, 2, and 3 are research papers written by TWC2 members.)

now playing | flashbacks | activism centre
filter paper | the mojo dojo | on the web
downloads | about us

copyright 2004Victoria Junior College | webmaster